Thinking about China today...
Aug. 27th, 2007 05:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
llcoolvad...prompted by an article in the Times about China and its impact on the environment. Just about the scariest article I've read in recent memory. There's a lot of focus on China lately with the recalls of all the dangerous products; and of course because of the approach of the 2008 Summer Olympics. I've been pretty interested in all of it.
I don't have any solutions. I'm just cranky. Doing laundry makes me cranky.
ETA: a few links
China Watch
The Consumerist's Chinese Poison Train
A different view
The U.S government's perspective
A while ago I watched a documentary called China Blue that was pretty graphic in its depiction of factory workers' lives in a blue jeans company (a blue jeans company that sells to Wal-Mart, I hasten to add): Workdays that would start at 8am and end at 2am. Endless fines for falling asleep or being late. Workers would only get paid once per month, and usually their paychecks were so small after food and fines were subtracted that they couldn't afford train fare to get home, so they couldn't quit. The filmmakers had access to the owner, and his casual arrogance and greed and sense of self-righteousness was the most horrific part. He felt he was doing them all a favor, since they could earn so much more working for him than they could working on their family farms.
And it seems that unrestrained arrogance is running amok everywhere in China now; everything is geared toward increasing production and quadrupling the economy, despite the obvious toll it's taking on the population. Apparently only 1% of urban dwellers in China have safe air to breathe. 1%! Living in the United States, I can't exactly take the moral high ground in the arrogance olympics. We have done much more than our share of damage to the world. And we buy all the stuff that China is selling. But the people in China seem to be unaware of what their government is allowing to happen — either unaware or unable to do anything about it — and I can totally relate to that feeling of helplessness.
What happens when the Chinese people have had enough of the skyrocketing death rates and the lack of clean drinking water? This is a disaster of epic, unspeakable dimensions in the making — and by "in the making" I don't mean in 50 years, I mean in the next five. The ABC show on Earth Day Planet Earth 2007 talked about the vast chunk of China that's a finger's breadth away from becoming the largest desert in the world. When that happens, how many will die?
The Western world plays an equal part in all of this, of course. Our retailers buy the cheap shit China is cranking out and then we buy it from the retailers, and finally toss it away because it's out of style or just because we're bored with it. We get a new car every few years, not because ours has worn out, but because there's a newer, shinier one with an iPod jack. Never mind the thousands of miners that have to pull all that ore out of the ground to turn into steel, or the miners that have to mine coal to power the factory that's going to build that car.
We had a disaster a couple of weeks ago in Utah — six men lost in a mine collapse. It's been a headline story in every news aggregator, despite the lack of success in finding any of the missing men, for the entire three week period. Three rescue workers were killed in a follow-up collapse. We're all engaged, hoping for the best, reading our news stories about these men. And yet over 4,000 chinese workers die in mines every year in China. We have six guys missing at the same time China had a flood in a mine that trapped/killed something like 181. Did you read about that?
And it seems that unrestrained arrogance is running amok everywhere in China now; everything is geared toward increasing production and quadrupling the economy, despite the obvious toll it's taking on the population. Apparently only 1% of urban dwellers in China have safe air to breathe. 1%! Living in the United States, I can't exactly take the moral high ground in the arrogance olympics. We have done much more than our share of damage to the world. And we buy all the stuff that China is selling. But the people in China seem to be unaware of what their government is allowing to happen — either unaware or unable to do anything about it — and I can totally relate to that feeling of helplessness.
What happens when the Chinese people have had enough of the skyrocketing death rates and the lack of clean drinking water? This is a disaster of epic, unspeakable dimensions in the making — and by "in the making" I don't mean in 50 years, I mean in the next five. The ABC show on Earth Day Planet Earth 2007 talked about the vast chunk of China that's a finger's breadth away from becoming the largest desert in the world. When that happens, how many will die?
The Western world plays an equal part in all of this, of course. Our retailers buy the cheap shit China is cranking out and then we buy it from the retailers, and finally toss it away because it's out of style or just because we're bored with it. We get a new car every few years, not because ours has worn out, but because there's a newer, shinier one with an iPod jack. Never mind the thousands of miners that have to pull all that ore out of the ground to turn into steel, or the miners that have to mine coal to power the factory that's going to build that car.
We had a disaster a couple of weeks ago in Utah — six men lost in a mine collapse. It's been a headline story in every news aggregator, despite the lack of success in finding any of the missing men, for the entire three week period. Three rescue workers were killed in a follow-up collapse. We're all engaged, hoping for the best, reading our news stories about these men. And yet over 4,000 chinese workers die in mines every year in China. We have six guys missing at the same time China had a flood in a mine that trapped/killed something like 181. Did you read about that?
I don't have any solutions. I'm just cranky. Doing laundry makes me cranky.
ETA: a few links
China Watch
The Consumerist's Chinese Poison Train
A different view
The U.S government's perspective
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-08-27 11:15 pm (UTC)The environmental situation is horrible and worrying, I agree. You are quite right that we in the western world are complicit - I'm as complicit as anyone: we don't have a car, we recycle everything, we use as little energy as possible... and then I buy the cheap T-shirts from H&M... consumerism is an insidious addiction.
I don't really have any solutions either, except that I wish the larger world powers would get behind environmentalism. But as long as we have an economic paradigm based on continuous growth, I can't see that happening.
(Doing laundry doesn't make me cranky, but a couple of glasses of wine obviously make me spout political views.)
no subject
Date: 2007-08-28 07:07 pm (UTC)